Manresa House of Retreats

Several buildings on Manresa’s campus date to the 19th century. St. Mary’s Hall is the primary housing facility for retreatants.

In early February, a storm along the south coast of Iceland destroyed part of Reynisfjara, a black sand beach famous for its sea cave formed from hexagonal basalt pillars. Reynisfjara is also infamous. Walk too close to its shoreline, and you risk getting trapped in one of its “sneaker waves.” Signs warn of the dangers of these walls of water that rise and collapse abruptly at the shoreline. In August 2025, a sneaker wave captured a 9-year-old girl from the beach and carried her to sea, the most recent of six deaths and dozens of emergencies at Reynisfjara this century.

A 2023 poll revealed that 70% of Icelanders will not rule out the possibility that mythological figures known as Hidden Folk live in the country’s rocks, hills and lava deserts. These stewards of the land are embedded in the population’s environmental consciousness. “They look like us. They are the same size. Do them a favor, they will do you a favor,” says folklorist and Icelandic saga translator Terry Gunnell. One theory among Icelanders, some of whom speak of the recent death at Reynisfjara much as Louisianians recall hurricane trauma, is that the Hidden Folk summoned the storm that eroded the beach. Margrét Lára Pétursdóttir explains the theory as we stroll far from Reynisfjara’s shoreline. “Mankind has not respected nature. There have been too many sacrifices here. Now, there will be no more.”

Between the Civil War and the Great Depression, Marist Fathers ran a Catholic school on the current site of Manresa House of Retreats. Their students were the sons of plantation owners on both sides of the Mississippi River.

Like many Icelanders, Pétursdóttir considers the sagas her heritage. Those tales of early settlers in Iceland were told for 200 years before scribes recorded them. The Gospels of the New Testament came much faster. The first, the Gospel of Mark, appeared approximately 40 years after the death of Christ. “We have to locate our own sacredness,” explains Gunnell. Or, as Joan Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

A month before the storm at Reynisfjara Beach, Mark Mossa, S.J., offered mass at Manresa House of Retreats in Convent, Louisiana, to a group of faculty and staff from Loyola University New Orleans. From the pulpit at Sacred Heart Chapel, I listened as he read the story that many know as the miracle of the loaves and fishes. A crowd of 5,000 gathered before Christ. As crowds do, this one grew hungry. With only several loaves and fish, Christ fed everyone.

“We can consider this a miracle,” said Mossa. “Or we can choose to look at it another way. Witnessing the generosity of Christ, the crowd chose to share what little they had.” In the latter version, the miracle becomes tangible, a human act of kindness, and what are stories if not reflections of who we are and who we can be, privileged glimpses that reveal our responsibilities toward others?

Located on the Mississippi River nearly equidistant between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Manresa was established in 1831 as Jefferson College, a boarding school for boys of nearby sugarcane planters. It shut down during the Great Depression. Jesuits, who had a retreat house nearby, bought the property in 1931 and began hosting retreats that same year. Today, more than 6,000 men attend silent retreats annually at Manresa. (The Cenacle on the Lake in Metairie hosts retreats for women.) Retreatants engage in the Spiritual Exercises, the compilation of prayers and meditations that St. Ignatius of Loyola developed to help others deepen their relationship with God.

“For St. Ignatius, ingratitude was the greatest of sins,” says Thomas F. Ryan, university chaplain at Loyola. “He believed we should be grateful for every breath.” The group from Loyola had gathered to do just that, also to write, build community, and engage with Ignatian values such as the “appreciation of things both great and small.” Doing so becomes second nature in the 130 acres of Manresa’s pristine live-oak-lined campus, where retreatants can stroll or sit in Adirondack chairs to contemplate questions from the Spiritual Exercises, among them “What do I want?” “What do I need to let go of to be a ‘person of others’?” or the one that Loyola Professor Allyn Schoeffler posed for her colleagues: “What is there to be awestruck by?”

Schoeffler’s question, while simply put, is anything but simplistic. As Ryan says, it echoes what St. Ignatius continually reminds us in the Spiritual Exercises: “Do not yield in the search.” In “The Moviegoer,” his National Book Award-winning novel set in New Orleans, Walker Percy puts it this way: “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” There is, whether in the lava desert, in scripture or beneath the swaying moss, always a source greater than ourselves.

Location: St. James Parish

Did You Know? Manresa House of Retreats offers 57 retreats each year, one every weekend except for Christmas, and several during the middle of the week. One hundred and nine men attend each retreat, totaling 6,000 per year. Retreatants must be at least 18 years old and typically arrive on Thursday afternoons. They have one communal dinner in which they are allowed to speak. Then silence starts. Over the next three days, retreatants attend 11 presentations, 30 minutes each, in which, to foster inner reflection and inspiration, as a retreat master guides them through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.